The streaming wars are now firmly into the “profitability” era, when companies are looking to make money from their streaming services rather than just getting as many subscribers as possible in the shortest amount of time by offering cheap subscriptions and tons of originals.

During the pandemic, with cinemas closed around the world, the streaming services took advantage of the situation to boost their streaming services, often releasing many films directly onto platforms like Disney+ and Hulu, or releasing new movies on these services within weeks of a new movie being released in cinemas.

But as the world recovered and people started to return to cinemas, we saw a significant shift in Disney’s strategy, instead refocusing its efforts on putting out more movies in cinemas first rather than going straight to streaming.   There are many reasons for this; primarily, releasing a movie in cinemas generates more income and offers additional revenue from the traditional window release strategy, which includes digital and physical sales, licensing and more.

During the last few years following the purchase of 20th Century Studios, many of their films were being sent straight to Disney+ or Hulu, but that’s all slowly been changing.

Recently, during an interview with THR, 20th Century Studios executive, Steve Asbell explained why a movie is released either in cinemas first or direct to streaming.

The landscape has changed so that theatrical is back. There’s a lot more opportunity in theatrical films, but since the consolidation of Disney+ and Hulu, there’s a tremendous audience for those [streaming] films. There’s still that thing with the streaming movies where we can really take chances with it and they can sort of be what they need to be. They don’t necessarily have to hit that theatrical threshold of, “how much is it? How many screens?”

Next year, “Predator: Badlands” is going to be getting a theatrical release, following the huge success of “Prey”, which many believe should have been released in cinemas as it was just so good. 

One of the recent films that went through a shift was “Alien: Romulus”, which was initially intended to go straight to Hulu and Disney+ but instead was given a theatrical release and pulled in over $350 million globally, making back its budget and promotional costs.    Steve Asbell explained why “Alien: Romulus” was shifted to cinemas:

It was started as a streaming movie because we started development when we were in COVID and it wasn’t clear what our strategy was going to be theatrical or streaming. At the time we had different sorts of budget categories for streaming, which we were always circumspect about not wanting to spend too much money on streaming movies. We didn’t know quite yet how they would perform based on the metrics. And the truth is we started it hoping that theatrical would return to some measure of normal. But we made that film and, frankly, every other film we’ve made for streaming, with the same care and curation as we do our theatrical movies.

Roger’s Take:  This year, we’ve seen a few movies from 20th Century Studios and Searchlight Pictures head straight to Hulu and Disney+, and I don’t think that’s going to change too much, since some films have a low enough budget that they would have been classed as a straight-to-video film years ago.  But a theatrical release for movies helps Disney on many different levels, not just financially, because it also acts as a commercial for the streaming service, since a movie released in cinemas is generally more regarded by audiences as being better than a movie released straight onto a streaming platform.

Another interesting aspect of Steve’s comments is about the consolidation of Disney+ and Hulu, which is currently in bit of an awkward stage of requiring two different subscriptions, but it does open up the studios films to reach a much larger audience when they’ve been combined together. 

What do you think of movies going straight to Disney+ and Hulu?  Let me know on social media!

Roger Palmer

Roger has been a Disney fan since he was a kid and this interest has grown over the years. He has visited Disney Parks around the globe and has a vast collection of Disney movies and collectibles. He is the owner of What's On Disney Plus & DisKingdom. Email: Roger@WhatsOnDisneyPlus.com Twitter: Twitter.com/RogPalmerUK Facebook: Facebook.com/rogpalmeruk

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